as stiff-necked aristocrats as any people of their day. We have not a
political aristocracy, that is all; but there is as absolute a division
between the orders of men and as little love, in this country as in any
country on the globe. The severance of the man who works for his living
with his hands from the man who does not work for his living with his
hands is so complete, and apparently so final, that nobody even imagines
anything else, not even in fiction. Or, how is that?" he asked, turning to
me. "Do you fellows still put the intelligent, high-spirited, handsome
young artisan, who wins the millionaire's daughter, into your books? I
used sometimes to find him there."

"You might still find him in the fiction of the weekly story-papers; but,"
I was obliged to own, "he would not go down with my readers. Even in the
story-paper fiction he would leave off working as soon as he married the
millionaire's daughter, and go to Europe, or he would stay here and become
a social leader, but he would not receive working-men in his gilded
halls."

The others rewarded my humor with a smile, but the banker said: "Then I
wonder you were not ashamed of filling our friend up with that stuff about
our honoring some kinds of labor. It is true that we don't go about openly
and explicitly despising any kind of honest toil--people don't do that
anywhere now; but we contemn it in terms quite as unmistakable. The
working-man acquiesces as completely as anybody else. He does not remain a
working-man a moment longer that he can help; and after he gets up, if he
is weak enough to be proud of having been one, it is because he feels that
his low origin is a proof of his prowess in rising to the top against
unusual odds. I don't suppose there is a man in the whole civilized
world--outside of Altruria, of course---who is proud of working at a
trade, except the shoemaker Tolstoy, and is a count, and he does not make